Agreement: Voters protected from purge

Updated 5:26 pm, Wednesday, October 3, 2012

AUSTIN — No Texans will be stricken from voter rolls simply for failing to respond to a notice that they're possibly dead under a court agreement announced Wednesday by lawyers who sued the state over the so-called purge.

The lawyers, Buck Wood and David Richards, said the state agreed that no voter will be removed from the rolls without information confirming the person is actually deceased.

Those who oversee elections in Bexar and Harris counties said this agreement won't change how they are now doing things.

Controversy arose after a new state law required the voter registration rolls to be matched against the Social Security Administration's master death file in an effort to clean up the voter list.

Most Popular

Counties got lists of “strong” and “weak” matches indicating whether people might be deceased. The weak matches turned out to include many of the living, and counties that sent letters to them drew concerns and complaints.

The list of potentially dead voters had been culled in Bexar County before letters initially were sent out in order to eliminate the living from those who got letters.

After a controversy in Harris County — where many voters got letters saying their existence on this earth was in question — the county reached an agreement with the secretary of state's office to similarly limit those who are stricken from the rolls.

Secretary of State Hope Andrade said in a statement that the agreement is in line with the process that long has been in place for removing voters from the rolls.

“Today's order is another step toward improving the integrity of the election system. The order means dead voters can and should be deleted from the rolls, and allows for the removal of dead voters to continue,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in a statement.